Chocolate Cream Pie

My 9 year old loves to bake! Over the summer, she's made banana bread, corn bread, and zucchini bread. It's pretty easy to just give her a recipe and let her go to town. She does, however, still need to learn to clean up after herself, so I don't let her bake as much as she'd probably like. At any rate, the beginning of this pie is her creation, and I only offered minimal input.

Katie decided she wanted a pie. Thanksgiving is coming up and it got her thinking about pie. First she asked if we could buy a gluten-free pie crust (she can't have gluten either). Having never seen one in the store, I said probably not, but it shouldn't be too difficult to make one. I suggested she use nuts as the base. She pulled out a bag of walnuts and started chopping them. She chopped about a cup worth and poured it into a bowl. She melted a fourth cup of butter and put in about a third a cup of dehydrated cane juice, mixing it all together. She put in some sorghum flour until it formed a crumbly dough. I have no idea how much, 1/3 cup perhaps? Then she pressed it into a pie pan. We baked that at 400 degrees for a few minutes. It looked a little puffy and the edges browned a bit. It was hard not to snack on the crust while the pudding cooked. It was really good!

I made the pudding. I only found a recipe for vanilla pudding, so I adapted.

2/3 cup dehydrated cane juice
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
2 3/4 cups milk

Stir together and heat to a boil, stirring constantly, then add:
4 Tbs arrowroot flour stirred into 1/4 cup cold milk (or add the milk and 6 Tbs cornstarch to the mixture above, if you want to do it cheap and simple)
dash of vanilla or almond flavor, or both! (I used almond, because I was out of vanilla)

Stir another minute or so, it'll thicken some, but not a lot. Pour it into the pie crust and refrigerate until cooled through. The pudding will continue to thicken as it cools.

The pie was absolutely delicious! There are, however, two observations I made. One, it is really quite sweet for me (but nowhere near as sweet as, say, a chocolate bar, so if you are used to sweet things, the recipe as posted should be perfect for you). It has a good strong chocolate flavor, so I don't think it will hurt to cut down a little bit on both the chocolate and the sugar, keeping a two to one ratio. The second observation being that this pie just screams for the addition of coconut. 1/3 cup unsweetened coconut would be a marvalous addition.